For my weekly quiet time, I studied Ecclesiastes 3.
My interpretation is this:
As Tremper Longman III says in his commentary on Ecclesiastes, “God has established periods, moments, or times for a wide diversity of emotions and activities”, and Qoheleth wonders, “Is the world a wonderfully ordered and varied place of joy?” In Ecclesiastes 3, Qoheleth tries to assure himself that it is. After thinking in Ecclesiastes 2 that there’s no point in working hard, Qoheleth now tells himself that God makes everything beautiful in its time, and that people should enjoy their labor and the fruits thereof, for they won’t live forever. Rather, they will die as the beasts. We don’t know if there’s an afterlife—if the spirit of man goes to heaven, whereas the spirit of beasts goes to the earth—and so we’d might as well enjoy this life as if it’s all we’ve got. And, when Qoheleth notices the injustice in Israel’s judicial system, he reminds himself that God is the ultimate judge, and a just one at that.
In my opinion, Qoheleth is wrestling with the apparent vanity of the world around him, and he’s seeking comfort in the things he’s learned about God from his religion. Sometimes, that cuts the mustard. Sometimes, it doesn’t.
The religious interactions with Ecclesiastes 3 that I read and heard today largely acknowledged Qoheleth’s embrace of divine providence and the way that God has made the world, but they had problems with the claim in chapter 3 that human beings are like the beasts. They contend that Qoheleth is seeking to refute that notion. For them, Qoheleth’s point is that human beings are not like the animals and do not share their fate, for God has placed eternity in people’s hearts, and the spirits of humans go to heaven, whereas the spirits of the beasts go down to the earth. The sermons that I heard (mostly from Calvary Chapel) took an opportunity to criticize evolution. “We are not advanced animals, as evolutionists tell us!”
I appreciated this passage in Brian Gault’s article on Ecclesiastes 3:11 (the verse that mentions olam in the heart) for Bibliotheca Sacra, a journal of the conservative Dallas Theological Seminary:
“The interpretation of many scholars and translations, ‘a consciousness of or yearning for that which transcends the present,’ seems foreign to Qoheleth’s focus on life ‘under the sun’ and in conflict with his skepticism about the afterlife.”
Tremper Longman is another evangelical scholar who acknowledges that Qoheleth is skeptical about the existence of an afterlife.
Some evangelicals and religious interpreters try to reconcile Qoheleth with a belief in an afterlife. Some of that flows from stuff that’s in Ecclesiastes, such as Ecclesiastes 3:21 and 12:7. Ecclesiastes 12:7 states that the spirit returns to God who gave it. Some of the religious interpreters’ desire to reconcile Qoheleth with an afterlife flows from their view that Ecclesiastes is God’s word and is thus consistent with other parts of God’s revelation, which explicitly affirm an afterlife.
Other evangelicals, however, disagree with Qoheleth’s skepticism regarding the afterlife, and yet derive lessons from his struggle.